A discussion we were having earlier about losing our confidence as a nation made me think of a series of Doonesbury strips from 1974.
Amazingly, I found the exact strips I was seeking on the web. I hope whoever holds the copyright will regard this as Fair Use (it certainly seems so to me).
The characters of the strip are having a costume party. Here’s the first strip:
That was followed the next day by this:
You can see the same point elaborated upon by the third strip, below.
We were talking previously about how the main character in “The Newsroom,” which I had belatedly started watching, bemoaned the lost greatness of our country, saying in part, ““We built great, big things, made ungodly technological advances, explored the universe, cured diseases and we cultivated the world’s greatest artists AND the world’s greatest economy. We reached for the stars, acted like men. We aspired to intelligence, we didn’t belittle it. It didn’t make us feel inferior….””
And I wondered:
And why don’t we do stuff like that any more? Why did we lose our confidence? Was it just Vietnam, or what?
Well, it seems that way back in 1974, Trudeau was sort of saying, yeah, that was it. And saying it in a way that would probably please no one.
Think about what an edgy thing that was to do back in 1974, with the war still going on — but after the U.S. had disengaged militarily (No, Virginia, the war did not “end” when we stopped fighting it.)
No wonder so many papers ran it on the editorial page. There were no other comics like that. And few editorial cartoonists could match this kind of depth and subtlety.
And think about the irony in the message Trudeau was laying out — among the folks who loved his strip (as opposed to the legions who hated it — the real reason so many papers put it in editorial), it was axiomatic that the Vietnam War was an awful thing, that our having gotten involved there was a blot on the national reputation.
And yet here the cartoonist was mourning what we had lost when the enterprise failed. I thought these strips were great at the time, but I wonder now what others thought of them.
In any case, it’s impressive…
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I wasn’t quite old enough to be reading Doonesbury at the time these appeared. But looking at them now I don’t interpret them in quite the geo-political terms you do. What I see instead is a sort of mini version of “The Big Chill” crammed into four little boxes.
Well, I think what Trudeau was trying to say goes a bit beyond “The Big Chill” — a movie I’ve always thought was overrated, by the way…
When Christians actively support a president who is an admitted philanderer, who insults and belittles people who oppose him in any way, who abandons old friends and ignores old committments, who lies habitually, who is incredibly callous toward refugees, and insouciant to those in need, claiming that he upholds their principles, then I think we have lost our way badly. And if committed Christians can wander this far, what about everyone else? This is the utopia that Ayn Rand’s philosophy has built, and it is ideologically bankrupt.